Posted
by
Zonk
on Saturday November 04, 2006 @06:40PM
from the for-reasons dept.

filenavigator writes "Microsoft has delayed the automatic install of IE 7 in Japan. There's an an interesting response in one of the MSDN blogs. IT pros are saying that they have done this because business users asked it to be delayed. It seems to me many business users here in North America wanted it to be delayed as well, but were forced to scramble and deploy IE 7 blocking software. This looks like more proof that the IE 7 automatic push was more for marketing reasons, than security. If it were a security issue, than why wait on the Japanese push?" Does anyone know the 'technical' reason that the autoinstall was delayed?

It is very possible that Microsoft wants IE7 to be installed for security reasons, and that there are no reasons that are important enough to outweigh that in the U.S. But lets say for example, that the language support in IE7 is broken for Japanese in some weird and newly discovered way, and that a large portion of Japanese web sites don't function properly.

So, see? While the security situation is the same in all countries, other issues may not.

I wouldn't get too enthusiastic just yet.Just to satisfy my curiosity, I read some of the posts at the linked to blogs.msdn.com, and you have people like this koolaidaholic to contend with:(http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/02/first -wave-of-localized-ie7-releases-now-available.aspx )

Funny, I think that Office 2003 is better than 2000 especially after supporting both. OpenOffice isn't that good, but there are only a few open source office productivity suites available. People like it because its one of the best pieces of software in that genre that is free. That does not make it good. Personally, I'd rather use Apple Pages or Mac Office 2004 for word processing than anything else. The real problem is that open office, word perfect and a slew of other apps tried to duplicate office

That was the last one that really corrupted my documents badly. It was a rather significant rewrite from the 95 suite. The range up to 2003 contains minor tweaks, and I've never found a reason to prefer a previous release in that series, unless performance/workset size has been a real issue. On the other hand, one line of improvement that won't affect U.S. users is the overall quality of the non-English lingual resources, where some very significant improvements have been made(/acquired) for some languages.

It's also not always Microsoft's fault. I work in the NHS an in Primary Care (GP surgeries amongst others), many places are under strict orders to block the upgrade because clinical software has been written in such a way that it works only with IE6. And there is also the issue that vital software hasn't passed conformence testing with the new version, yet.

It's pretty piss poor that the third party software is so non-standards compliant that this is the case, but, and I say this as someone without a Win

It's also not always Microsoft's fault. I work in the NHS an in Primary Care (GP surgeries amongst others), many places are under strict orders to block the upgrade because clinical software has been written in such a way that it works only with IE6. And there is also the issue that vital software hasn't passed conformence testing with the new version, yet.

Wait a minute... clinical software written for IE6? It already scares me when I hear about critical stuff running on Windows, but this is absolutely ho

It's not the main body of the clinical systems themselves, so you don't need to worry about that side of things (at least not because of IE6). It's the parts that link the system into the new centralised databases. And no doctors actually want that, so quite frankly, the longer it takes to get it working, the better, IMNSHO.

I worked in an NHS IT department. Patient data was handled over non-encrypted browser sessions to backend systems written in ASP VB with gaping sql injection mechanisms. We also had a wireless lan with no WEP on it. I brought these to the IT head's attention. I don't work there any more. The network manager who put in the wireless does, as does the guy who coded the web applications. Go figure.

It hasn't entirely improved. The standard defenses when pointing out this sort of stuff are: it's over NHSnet (a

This is a question of "bang for the buck". By making it available for XP they get most of the installed base of windows. There would be additional work to make it work on Windows 2000, and it might not even be remotely possible to make it work on Windows 95/98/Me.

It also gives their sales force an argument to get the remaining people to upgrade.

Microsoft is NOT concerned about the stability or security of your system that is running a Windoze OS. MS only cares about extracting as much money from you as it can before its "house of cards" OS collapses in the face of real flaws and security threats and some FOSS OS (Ubuntu anyone?) becomes the new default. Why else would MS be siding with SuSe and/or Novell? As a rule, MS goes against your best interests.

It may also be that fact that in the US, the Justice Department caved in to Microsoft during the anti-trust legalities. However, over in Asia, Microsoft's illegal practices are looked at somewhat more closely, and the governments there are less inclined to allow the illegal leveraging of a monopoly to continue unchecked. So Microsoft has to remain on its best behaviour.

Wait a minute, is ie7 100% backwards compatible with ie6? I seem to recall it isn't. Then, how can Microsoft push it in updates? what about people relaying on the browser for intranet web apps that can break?

It's not backwards compatible and this breaks a lot of Intranet sites. My Univerity (shitty Humboldt State University in CA) uses a system (being phases out) called Banner for managing class registration, payments and just about everything else you could imagine. There's been lots of problems in the latest and greatest banner with IE 7. It's going to be very interesting to see if these problems cause any large scale issues come registration time. There's also been issues with Universities not using the latest and greatest version of Cisco's Clean Access network management software. Any student with IE 7 installed are unable to gain access to the Internet at school's employing those version of Clean Access. That's been lots of fun as admins at those schools are creating exceptions left and right and at this point are probably just turning Clean Access off until they can deploy the latest version. Wells Fargo isn't working with IE 7. I had a wonderful conversation with a buddy of mine that works at their online banking call center. She wants to kill Microsoft right now. There are plenty of problems all over the place.

Lots and lots of colleges use banner to manage all things electronic... this is the first time I've heard about it breaking in IE7, but I haven't really followed it. At my undergrad school, banner did a pretty good job of breaking all by itself, no matter what browser you used.

But if people hadn't coded their web sites so closely to IE5/6 then they probably wouldn't have a problem with IE7. I mean, it would probably take a little longer to make it work with Firefox and IE, but the result is they aren't tied to a single vendor's implementation.

But that's the past. Will the people who got so burned by this learn their lesson and make their sites cross browser compatible? Or will they repeat the same mistake except with IE7?

But that would mean they would have to pay more money and break the Microsoft TCO advantage.

I love the reports that say free as in beer software costs more because the trained monkeys supporting it expect more money then Microsoft's monkeys. Yes, I say monkeys because in order to get the numbers right, i suspect monkey business going on.

Microsoft probably did this just to fuck with your friend's mind. She is a most powerful Admin, after all.

SCENE: Your friend and Microsoft are standing in Microsoft's office. Your friend has her light saber drawn in an offensive stance while Microsoft stands rather tensly in front of your friend. Microsoft's fear is carefully hidden. Its back is to your friend.

WF_ADMIN: I won't be a pawn in your political game. Wells Fargo is my family.

And this is another good reason why any and every web site or web "app" must be compatible with more than one browser. IE fails? So what, fire up Firefox!One of the main goals of making "Web apps" is to free yourself from proprietary APIs and environments. If you make an IE only app then you might as well have just made a Win32 app. With Firefox in the mix your web "app" can run on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, BeOS, OS/2, and more!

I hope for the sake of all that is good that these IE only sites that are ha

Wells Fargo isn't working with IE 7. I had a wonderful conversation with a buddy of mine that works at their online banking call center. She wants to kill Microsoft right now. There are plenty of problems all over the place.

THIS is the things savvy web devs were warning the rest of the world all these years: write bad code and it'll bite you in fuhture browser versions.

You know 90% of the problems are caused because of horrid coding that has become as some sort of established practice on intranet and even m

Then why are all these sites are also mostly broken in other browsers? Fact is, IE7 is a whole new standard, close but not quite what Firefox, Opera, etc. use, and not even compatible with the psuedo-standard that is IE6. What a mess.

Our accounting software vendor warned us last month that we had to block IE7 because the web interface to accounts (which is heavily used here) breaks utterly even though they use MS libraries and components to make it from what I understand.

"Wait a minute, is ie7 100% backwards compatible with ie6? I seem to recall it isn't. Then, how can Microsoft push it in updates? what about people relaying on the browser for intranet web apps that can break?"

its not the first time a microsoft update has broken existing applications, under the excuse of 'better security'.

Yes, marketting is one of the reasons. Security is however, another one (is the browser perfect? HELL NO! Is it better than IE6? HELL YEAH). The main one, in my opinion, is to get rid of IE6 as quickly as humanly possible. And this, the slashdot crowd, especialy the ones who do commercial web design, should appreciate it. Freagin FUD. Yes, Microsoft is evil blah blah blah: Doesn't change anything. The internet will benifit from being rid of IE6, even if it means another IE replacing it.

I don't see the point. I don't do web development, but I have heard the new IE is just about as bad as the old IE when it comes to standards compliance. It's just bad in different ways. So won't web developers have to throw away tons of information on IE6 incompatibility, just to figure it out all over again for IE7? Sounds like a lot of wasted time.

IE7, while still crap, is lighyears better than IE6 when it comes to standards. I have done a few things on IE7, which I tend opened in Firefox, and often it worked on first try. Sometimes I had 1-2 things to fix. Its not -perfect-, but it can literally slash in half the time it takes to make things cross-browser, if you work in a world without IE6. Also while IE7 isn't perfectly secure, it is still a lot more, and on Vista, it is sandboxed (so again, not perfect, but easily an order of magnitude more secur

So it is a required upgrade, unless you figure out a way to move everyone to Firefox tomorrow

Why don't people just use this as an opportunity to switch to Firefox or Opera? If a whole bunch of sites are already breaking with IE7, why not just go all the way for full standards compliance? Don't most people make sites that work in Firefox/Opera and validate, then hack them for IE?

All the issues people are having are bad. But if an application is made IE6 only, what do you think is harder? Fixing it t

Don't most people make sites that work in Firefox/Opera and validate, then hack them for IE?

The peanut gallery in their spare times do. A -couple- of significant companies. Go on any mainstream web site, and right click and look at the source. Its about 50/50, give or take. Last I checked, Google didn't even have a freagin doctype.

If I had to guess, I would say going from IE6 to IE7 would be harder than IE6 to something standards compliant. The web standards are fairly well documented by w3c. The bugs

Well, let's accept your argument. IE7 is Microsoft's gift to the world to make up for IE6. (Or possibly IE3.) However, that isn't the question. The real question is "why isn't this brilliant new security feature / standards-compatible browser being automatically installed for the Japanese until the new year?"

The claim seems to be that IE7 is being delayed for issues of compatibility. Okay, that may be reasonable. Your argument is that the benefits trump the loss of compatibility everywhere, other than in

Sorry, my argument was only related to the pseudo-conspiracy theories people have been pushing around. I don't have an answer as to why its not being pushed in Japan. Japanese have fairly different business process than most of the rest of the world, work in environments 10x more stressful than most of the rest of us, have a weirdo 4-mode written language, and are very involved in the tech world. So maybe their problems were bigger, and their voice louder.

Never ceases to amaze me how many IT people like to do nothing then act like it's someone else's fault when shit comes out. I'm seeing that with Vista. A number of IT people in other departments are not testing it hardly at all. They say "Well it's not even out yet and when it does come out I'm not deploying it for a long time." Right except that ignores that professors will be buying systems and those systems will come with Vista. Guaranteed these guys get caught with their pants down on at least one issue

If so many interactive intranet app developers didn't use activex controls, MS tools and MS libraries that only work with IE then more would. We have FF installed and set as the default browser throughout our organization and almost all Internet sites our users need work just fine. A few do not. Our 2nd most used intranet app, however, only works with IE. (And not with IE 7)

Not sure why but last time I checked (which was some time last week), the Japanese version was only available as an RC. Just checked again now and noticed that the final version's available. So anyway it looks to me like the release schedule for the Japanese version is a couple of weeks behind that of the English version.

From what I understand, IE7 is being removed from corporate systems just as quickly as it's being installed. IE7 is breaking applications left and right. Macromedia's Dreamweaver won't operate properly if IE7 is installed on the same computer. There are other applications as well. Payroll software, punch clock software, etc.. It's apparently breaking all sorts of things.

At my friend's company, there was a corporate wide memo stating that no one was to install IE7 except the "new media" departments, because they do all the website work and need to be able to test how IE7 slaughters their HTML and CSS. Even the new media departments were told to install "At your own risk".

I don't think it's too far fetched to believe that the Japanese market caught word of how IE7 is breaking all sorts of other software and asked Microsoft not to push it. I think the response in the IE blog is bullshit. The Japanese don't want IE7. Not if it's going to break everything.

Its kind of funny. Usualy we hear about how its the developer's fault that they are writting "non-standard compliant" code, and that they deserve what they get if it breaks in Firefox, or whatever... Now though, since code break because the code isn't standard compliant enough (while IE7 isn't very good still, it does a much better job rendering standard CSS than it does randering IE6 targetted crap) in a microsoft browser, its Microsoft thats evil:)

A lot of the software that are breaking which are not related to web, however, do so because of their use of the MSHTML rendering engine... In a -lot- of cases, just changing the doctype tend to make things -relatively- OK. For the rest...well, IE7 has been in beta and RC for how long now? I know that IT stuff doesn't happen overnight, but Microsoft gave as much warning as they possibly could. If stuff broke (and I'm guilty of that, some web apps I wrote did break, and I didn't take time to test it in IE7), its the developer's own damn fault. They had like a year or something. Jesus...

As a software developer, and an ex-company owner, I believe I understand all the sides of the issue. But in all fairness to everyone but Microsoft,
I think I need to point out that Microsoft changes the rules all the time. Just because it workes a certain way in a beta or an RC, doesn't mean that is how it is going to work in the RTM (release to manufacturing). Since I don't write browser specific HTML code, I am not aware of the specific changes causing the problems, but in a more perfect world, companies

IE7 does *not* slaughter HTML and CSS. It breaks hacks that worked in IE6 because of unimplemented features there (or just plain bugs in IE6).
Anyone who wrote HTML and CSS in standards-compliant ways, and worked around IE6 with conditional comments (and *not* by using hacks) will find their pages working smoothly.
There's a substantial *improvement* in CSS support, but it's obviously not 100%.

At my friend's company, there was a corporate wide memo stating that no one was to install IE7 except the "new media" departments, because they do all the website work and need to be able to test how IE7 slaughters their HTML and CSS.
IE6 has horrible CSS support. IE7 has pretty decent CSS support. If someone's coded their site so it doesn't work with a browser that implements CSS in a standard way, then they're idiots for doing that, and they've already got problems with any customer-facing stuff, becaus

IE6 has horrible CSS support. IE7 has pretty decent CSS support. If someone's coded their site so it doesn't work with a browser that implements CSS in a standard way, then they're idiots for doing that, and they've already got problems with any customer-facing stuff, because they're turning away customers who use Firefox.

I can't argue wih you that IE7 has better CSS support than IE6. It is better. And it's also far from standards compliant. My friend's company? It's the Florida Times-Union, and their we

Last I heard, everyone on Slashdot was screaming bloody murder because IE7's CSS implementation didn't pass the Acid 2 test. Now we're upset because it implements the CSS standard better than IE 6 did?

I forgot to mention something. Have you ever tried reading Slashdot with IE7? It completely slaughters that CSS and is pretty much unreadable. If IE7 is so standards compliant when it comes to CSS, why does Slashdot look like shite?

Slashdot has some of the best written code I've ever seen. You can't argu

It breaks the IE 6 hacks while not supporting CSS properly. It would be fine if it didnt break the IE 6 hacks OR if it supported CSS properly but its stuck somewhere in the middle and its causing chaos.
Personally, I have a site I coded recently using straightforward CSS, and it renders fine on Firefox, Opera, and IE7. The only browser it doesn't render properly on is IE6, so I had to put a hack into the CSS to get it to degrade gracefully under IE6. So admittedly this is a sample size of 1, but as far as

You have this the wrong way round. IE 7 has actually gotten better at rendering. Its breaking things because the dodgy hacks that had to be put into code to get it working right with IE 6 (rightly) no longer work.We've had a couple of things "break" in our office, and had the webmaster go through the old code. I stopped counting the times I heard him tell people on the telephone "well, yes, it shouldn't have worked in the first place."

Microsoft got themselves into this hole, and now they are realising that

It seems to me that the fact that IE7 breaks things is good, and the fact that IE7 is automatically pushed is also good. Here's why --and, no, I'm not trying to be sarcastic.We've long known that the dominant browser on people's desktops is a broken IE that is a nightmare for Web designers trying to be standards-compliant. IE7 is a lot more standards-compliant than IE6, to the point that it readily breaks web sites that were designed for IE6. Presumably it brings it much more in line with "real" browsers

That's not the only thing that IE7 has broken. I bought a new Gateway desktop last week, Core 2 Duo E6300, 2 gigs ram, T.V. Tuner, 256 meg Geforce 7300 LE (Lame Edition), XP Media Center edition.Within 15 minutes of installing IE7, Media Center stopped working. Every 15 seconds I would get a message that the Media Receiver Service had crashed. It was so weird that I was convinced I had gotten a virus, even though I had locked the system down snugger than a bug within an hour of starting it the first time.

This is not (only) Microsoft's fault. The developers that built applications that work only in broken IE6, and the institutions that bought them are even more responsible for this happening then Microsoft. They are pushing this update because it is a GOOD THING(TM) for which many web developers have been waiting for years. More secure, more standard compliant, less bugs. Most of the things that will break because of this upgrade are already broken. So stop blaming Microsoft for the incompetence of you web d

For crying out loud, this is the sort of thing that really bugs me.
I was recently asked, publicly, what my #1 web development annoyance is. I answered IE6. So I don't have any love for Microsoft. I also own a Mac Pro and a Macbook. So I've spent good money on Apple. And I like my machines. But there's a seriously painful double standard here:

Every incremental feature update of OSX costs $130. Incremental feature updates to Windows are free (by incremental, I mean
ones where the underlying OS is the same, but features are added. Think OSX and Windows XP)

Firefox has an automatic push feature that automatically downloads and offers to install the new version of FF. So does IE.

You can only install OSX on Apple hardware. Any licensing restrictions on the use of Windows causes a serious outcry here.

Steve Jobs has openly said his iPod marketing strategy involves building iPods in such a way that forces users to buy new ones
every year. Imagine if Microsoft said something similar about Windows (never mind that there *is* a new version of OSX that you
have to buy every year or so if you want the newest features)

Firefox recently got into a licensing dispute with a Linux vendor who wanted to use its name but not its logo. Firefox legally
blocked them (relatively minor, but still)

The bottom line is that lately, MS has been behaving fairly well. I think that's clear. They've executed legally binding agreements not to sue based on certain patents it holds, implemented very impressive CSS improvements to IE, and brought the Firefox crew over to Vista headquarters to help them make the transition to Vista.
We should step back for just a bit and let Microsoft get IE7 and Vista out. Quite frankly, the day IE7 kills IE6, I will be a very happy person. And so will many, many web developers. The "push" is actually a pretty good thing, in the end.
Until the day that I start seeing people attacking Apple for Jobs' "reality distortion field" and practices that sometimes closely mirror the actions of Microsoft, I'll look dubiously at posts like this. Frankly, I'm getting tired of them.

But IE6 won't be killed. It's going to be around as long as people are using Windows 2000, at least.

I have no point of view about automatic updates and Microsoft vs. Firefox, except, I really suspect that the Mozilla/Firefox api is far more orthogonal to customers' systems and applications than IE. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, if I'm not, it's because Microsoft chose for it to be that way and therefore does have more responsibility for thinking twice before pushing something down the line.

If it's an incremental update (your first contention), then your fourth contention is in direct opposition--incremental updates don't proffer "new features." With the exception of Windows SP2, when was the last "free" update to Windows known to provide new features and critical technologies? SP1? SP1a? W2K SP3? None of these are equivalent to new iterations of OS X.

Compare Apple's update cycle to Microsoft's, prior to their "we're done with Windows!" release of XP. You had Windows 95B, Windows 98,

Here's a summary of what changed between various versions of Windows, also taking into account that Windows 2000 is in a different product line than Windows 95/98/ME.Home:1995 - Windows 95 - New Windows GUI, new API, Plug and Play. Device Drivers are implemented directly in Windows instead of in DOS.1997 - Windows 95b - Preliminary USB and FAT32 support, not available in stores1998 - Windows 98 - USB and FAT32 support in mainstream. Unlike Windows 95, supports drives larger than 32GB. First version to in

Excellent overview. As you illustrated succinctly, aside from 2000/XP switching to the NT kernel, there are no earth-shattering differences. Windows Media Player (not Classic), Movie Maker, System Restore, etc. joined the cast at various points.

Meanwhile, here's a simple overview of the supposedly "incremental" updates to OS X since 10.1:

I would bet that there were things in Japanese sites (CSS?) that would've been broken, perhaps?The fact of the matter is, when IE7 came out here in the US (still haven't seen an AUTO INSTALL on WinXP SP2 on my home machine?!), the newspaper company I work for scrambled to fix all of its sites to handle some odd CSS issues in IE7 that had been resolved in IE6. Web-based admin tools that our newspapers use, as well as the newspaper websites themselves, had to be examined from front to back to make sure that

I don't know the specific technical reasons why IE7 has been delayed in Japan, but I have worked in Japan and with Japanese clients in the IT industry for 12 years and I can tell you that while American and western users might like to think that they
hold high standards for software quality, that is NOTHING compared to what Japanese companies and users expect. There is a tradition of service (at ridiculuos cost to the provider). If I was running a software company, I'd outsource all the QA work to Japan. T

I've been using PC Relocator 6 (which use to be by Aloha Bob) for almost 2 years now. It's a great program that has allowed my clients to move from one old PC to another new faster PC when the time comes. PC Relocator allows me to transfer their files, settings and programs almost flawlessly. It's been a life and business savior for many of my people.
I was at a customer this week that needed to get a new PC. I went to the Aloha Bob website to see if there was some information on how to tansfer a certain t

Look, IE7 is largely incompatible with IE6. So lots of websites will have to be redesigned now. If they have to be reworked anyways, you can do it with proper HTML and CSS support, getting rid of the proprietary IE crap. Which means Firefox, Opera, etc. will work just as well.

Well that answers the burning question "Why do I still have IE 6 even though I have auto-update running on my WinXP boxes?" I was starting to feel left out.

I wonder if this was just Slash-hysteria all along, or if MS changed their minds about how to handle the updates. I guess if I'd bothered to read the articles when this story first came out I might know.

This has always been the plan. Since Microsoft first announced they would distribute IE7 via Windows Update they have consistently maintained it would be optional and would always ask the user for permission.

Like many other Microsoft-related stories, the Slashdot crowd tends to prefer making up their own facts and ignoring reality if that reality happens to show Microsoft in a less than satanic light.

The best feature of IE7 is that it makes it easier to use Firefox. No, really. With IE7 installed, when you enter a URL into a Windows Explorer windows (as I frequently did as a mattter of habit when I was using IE6), it launches the default browser (Firefox in my case). With IE6, it just turns the Explorer window into an IE window - convenient, but a pain in the neck when you realize that you've been using IE.

Really? I wonder if that works for those really stupid applications that only use IE for URL handling. If I could use this to get Adobe Acrobat Reader to start using my default browser instead of IE, that would be a terrific reason for installing IE7.

IE 7 IS better than IE 6. That alone makes it a security update. If it were named ie 6.x with tabs, better security and standards, you wouldnt see this article at all. this is the same as XP SP2 being delayed in some environments for testing.

Well, according to the release notes you apparently must install an optional addon before installing IE7 on a Japanese system (for it to even work? This is unclear...), and you can't install it after. That sounds like a good enough reason to me to not force it out: what percentage of folks will have that prereq? (I know I don't, and hadn't even heard of it.) I am not even sure what that has to do with Japanese systems especially, but if it's in the release notes, it must be pretty serious.Seems logical

Our business relys on our page. It worked fine for many functions on Firefox (and Camino), Opera, IE 6, Safari, and others. It breaks in two important aspects on IE 7. I am no html expert to know why, I just know the bill pament function ain't workin and that DOES effect business. Thanks Redmond!

Chances are your web team coded in a couple of IE6-specific hacks to make it work. Now that IE7 is a lot closer to spec, the site is still feeding it the hacked code and IE7 is going "WTF is this shit?".

You just need to get the team to take out the IE hacks for an IE7 user-agent string.

Congratulations, you've made one of the most intelligent and relevant posts in the debate so far.

Microsoft made available tools to control the deployment of IE7 (of course, up to a certain date, then you will be forced AFAIR), which should have been used by the server admins in businesses (schools count as a business here) where such a change could negatively affect productivity.Good sysadmins test and test and test. Also, as you mention, the users are used to the old software; the new software is very dif